The Casino Sign My Mother Read
The phone call to my mother
“It’s done,” I said. “It’s paid. Both eyes, the good lenses, the fifteenth and the twenty-ninth. You can’t give it back because it’s already spent and they don’t refund it, so there’s no use arguing, and I already know everything you’re going to say so you can just save your breath and say thank you.”
There was a long quiet on the line.
“Dana,” she said, and her voice had gone small. “That’s your land money.”
“It was,” I said. “Now it’s your eyes. It’s the one thing on this earth he can’t ever get his hands on, Mama. It’s in your head. Nobody can lose your eyes at a card table.”
I had not meant to say that last part. It came out before I could stop it, and it told her more than I wanted it to. She did not ask me what I meant. She is my mother. She already knew the shape of my marriage better than I did.
“All right,” she said, after a while. “All right. Thank you.”
Two words. From my mother, who did not take things, that was a flood.
The fifteenth
I took off work for the surgeries. They do one eye at a time, two weeks apart, which Carol in the recovery chair next to us would want me to tell you is the right way, you never do both eyes the same day.
The surgery itself takes about fifteen minutes. That is the thing nobody believes. Two years of a woman’s whole bright mind going dark behind a gray film, and the fix is fifteen minutes and a numbing drop and a little flutter of light she said looked like being inside a kaleidoscope.
They sent her home with a clear plastic shield taped over the eye and a bag of drops and a list of rules, and she slept the whole afternoon in my guest room with the shade down.
The patch came off the next morning at the follow-up.
Dr. Reed peeled the tape and shined his light and checked his numbers, and then he leaned back and said, “All right, Nita. Look around the room and tell me what you see.”
She looked at the eye chart on the wall. She read the third line down without being asked. Then the fourth. Then she stopped, and her chin started going, and she put her hand up over her mouth.